Archive for ‘MRAs’

What happens when men finally realize they can no longer suppress women’s speech? When their counter-arguments prove to be unsubstantiated and factually incorrect? When they’re forced to accept that nobody takes the word “misandry” seriously, because while “misogyny” evokes the horrors of witch-burnings, female genital mutilation, honor killings, suttee, forced lobotomies and Chinese foot-binding, “misandry” only manages to evoke the image of an overweight white dude who hates his ex-wife and gets off on punching his perceived grievances into a keyboard…?

It was a Wednesday. Four of us, (maybe 5?) were meeting together on the third floor of the big house that then (and now) serves as a rape crisis line and transition house, staffed 24 hours by women who volunteer their time and their best work to aid women to escape violence. Often, our best was pretty good. Sometimes it wasn’t. There weren’t many of us then, to do that work together. There are still too few, 22 years later, far too few.

William S. Burroughs was a great American intellectual, novelist, poet and essayist, considered to be “one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century”. He is something of a cult figure, having had eighteen books published, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, excluding the books in which his interviews and letters appeared. He also recorded with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

Burroughs held a strong belief that women were superfluous and should be eliminated. He wrote seriously on this issue, which I will address in a moment. But in case you are under the impression he was being ironic by promoting this grand plan of his, it’s worth pointing out that he “eliminated” his own wife with a gun, getting away with it, unpunished, on the grounds that her murder was “a sex game gone wrong.”